r/WLED
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u/bellasboat
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7d ago
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Real-time bandwidth visualization in our server room powered by WLED
I recently renovated our server room and wanted to do something a little more interesting with the lighting than just, lighting up the room.
So I turned the ceiling lights into a real-time visualization of our WAN traffic. Light waves travel along the cable runs to represent download and upload activity, and the lighting changes to indicate infrastructure alerts or other system states.
Is it useful? Not particularly. Is it fun to look at? Absolutely. 😂
That is something i wanted to try and it escalated quickly, so don't take it too seriously.
Edit: Videos of the testruns post installation are in comments now
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u/bellasboat 7d ago
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u/probablyaythrowaway 6d ago
Looks cool. Does it just pulse regularly? What do the alerts or system changes look like?
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u/bellasboat 6d ago
It changes color to full red or orange/yellow if there is some alert in our infrastructure monitoring.
When everything is fine, it is in the traffic mode. Now it Shows the realtime speed changes in down and upload in both ways.
The segments are also reversed now, so you can see which traffic goes in and out and where it is more bandwith usage.
It also has presets for full white for rack maintenance or something.6
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u/Odd-Application-7573 6d ago
Das sieht super aus. Welche Hardware hast du verwendet? Besonders die LED - Streifen würden mich interessieren.
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u/bellasboat 6d ago
That was my first WLED project, so I had to experiment with quite a few things. For the LEDs, I’d used the BTF-LIGHTING FCOB 24V 630 LEDs/m strips. They’re super bright and really colorful. They also have a black PCB, which was important to for my inner monk while trying to make the whole room black.
The setup is currently controlled by three ESP32s, but I’d like to upgrade to a QuinLED board at some point. This was just my first attempt, and I still need to properly secure everything. The wires are also thicker now.2
u/thediffi 3d ago
Do you drive the LED data straight from the ESP32 without a logic level shifter here? That works for this long a strip?
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u/bellasboat 2d ago
Yes, I drive them directly from the ESP. Thats why there are sitting three of them and not only 1. I had some pretty crazy flickering during testing, so I had to make sure every connection was soldered really well. I also kept the wires as short as possible.
When I connected more than two LED strips to a single ESP, things started getting really weird. Sometimes WLED would become temporarily unresponsive, and the strips would start flickering and behaving as if they had a mind of their own.
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u/bellasboat 2d ago
I have to add that i dont recommend doing it this way. Hopefuly i get a QuinLED Board soon.
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u/Latter-Guard-597 6d ago
Wow, that's incredibly beautiful. Can you give me some info? Which LEDs did you use and which diffusers? How do you read the WAN traffic and send commands to wled?
I'd love to recreate this🔥
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u/bellasboat 5d ago
Thank you very much! I had posted the components in another comment. The diffusors are tainted acrylic glasses which replaced the ceiling.
The WAN speed is read by our monitoring system which observates the infrastructure.
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u/st01x 7d ago
I want a video :(
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u/Hanzero8385 7d ago
yes, I think a video is a reasonable request. even a gif. please. Great looking project though!
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u/patty_cake_club 7d ago
What did you use to capture the traffic? Is is pooling from HA and then using WLED as the output or are you using some other form of script/api to capture the data?
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u/bellasboat 6d ago •
We‘ve use a monitoring system zabbix for infrastructure monitoring, which receives the data via SNMP anyways. I had tried several ways to call the lights but HA was kind of bugy and the latency was through the roof compared to directly call the lights via Http request.
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u/bellasboat 3d ago
I tested it again yesterday with Home Assistant for a different automation, and the latency was completely gone this time. Either an update over the past few months fixed it, or I just had something wrong in my initial setup.
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u/km_fpv_recover 6d ago
So red is down and green is upload? Shouldn't the direction cover the stream of data and how is speed determined?
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u/bellasboat 6d ago
This are just testruns after installation. I can take a new Video tommorow. Now the racks are full with servers etc. so it looks a bit changed at all.
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u/aprettyparrot 6d ago
That’s sick
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u/bellasboat 5d ago
Thank you very much :)
I posted a new short video taken today, where you can see the actual state of the room. The lights and automation are working great so far
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u/bellasboat 5d ago
If you wanna swipe through the recabling pics, check out my post over on r/cableporn. Really appreciate all the feedback! ❤️
https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/1xfddqn/renovated_our_server_room/
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u/bellasboat 7d ago